Youth in Formation

Four Scholars at Fordham Confront the Catholic Teen Dilemma

by Matthew G. Alderman

But, why did Jesus get whacked?” quoted the pert, red-jacketed woman on
the stage. Laughter rang out in the long, low hall as veteran youth minister
Margaret McCarty recalled a question from a baffled teen she’d once heard
in catechism class. Young people want to know the faith, she explained, and need
an environment where an adult won’t grin at theological terminology that
is more The Sopranos than the Nicene Creed.

Fordham’s Pope Auditorium was packed with twenty-something youth leaders
from Long Island, timid college students, mossy academic types, and a handful
of black-suited priests. Next to me in the nosebleed seats, a gangly youth in
a yarmulke emphatically scribbled notes. The evening’s topic: Catholic
Teenagers: Faith at Risk?

Virtually nobody under eighteen showed up.

Alarming Findings

McCarty, founder of the National Federation for Catholic Youth Ministry, was
one of the evening’s four panelists, brought together by the university’s
Center on Religion and Culture.

They had come to discuss the alarming findings presented in Soul Searching:
The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers by Christian Smith,
principal investigator of the National Study on Youth and Religion and director
of Notre Dame’s Center for the Sociology of Religion. Purdue’s James
Davidson, Alison Donohue of Regis High School campus ministry, and Smith himself
were present. Notre Dame president emeritus Fr. Edward “Monk” Malloy,
C.S.C., acted as moderator.

Smith explained that the National Study conducted nearly 3,000 parent-child phone
interviews, with follow-up as the respondents grew older, supplemented by 267
personal interviews with teens in 45 states. As far as Catholicism is concerned,
the results were appalling.

When the seventeen interviewers finally compared notes, Smith recalled, “we
all . . . looked at each other and said, ‘What is up with the
Catholic teenagers?’” In
nearly all sociological measures of religious strength, Catholics fared poorly,
showing “a thin connection” to the age-old faith, both “in
their lives and in their imaginations.” Mormons did the best, while Jews
proved even more lax than Catholics.

The study divides believing teens into four groups: the devoted, the regulars,
the sporadic, and the disengaged. Catholic teens are most likely to be sporadic
and least likely to be devoted. Of Catholic teens surveyed:

• 85% believe in God
• 71% have made First Communion
• 64% think
that God is involved in their lives
• 62% pray alone at least once a week
• 40%
attend Mass about once a week
• 40% went to Confession in the last year
• 23%
are in at least one service or mission project

Most apparent to the speakers was the need for basic catechesis. Teens need content,
Smith remarked: “They may rework it, they may reject it, they may do anything.
. . . At least they have something to work with.” The study’s
results depict not mass apostasy but the fruits of simple ignorance.

On first seeing the numbers, McCarty had been struck by the difference between
the report’s subjects and her own charges: Where did they find all
these bewildered teens? The problem is not the fervent core, but the invisible
millions who don’t show up at Mass.

Smith said one unique aspect of Catholicism distorted the study: Fallen-away
Catholics self-identify with Catholicism more than lapsed members of other denominations
identify with their former churches. As a consequence, their inclusion may have
unduly darkened the study’s findings, at least in comparison with other
bodies.

Modeling Parents

However flawed, the statistics still cannot be explained away. A critical problem
area is parental involvement in the spiritual lives of their children. For many
Catholic teens, there isn’t any, but there should be. Whatever facades
teens put up, they listen to their parents. “We will get what we are,” encapsulated
Smith. What parents model in the home, their children will practice in their
own lives.

This issue goes back to the spiritual formation of today’s parents. Davidson,
a sociologist of religion, remarked that even in the much-idolized 1950s, “Catholic
teenagers were more likely to be playing basketball in the parish gym than they
were to attend Lenten liturgies.”

A comparison of the report with similar information from the last fifty years
shows a downward trend in faith just barely starting to turn around. Today’s
teens may be doing slightly better than their immediate predecessors.

Davidson chalked this up to the traumatic shift that occurred in the 1960s as
certain interpretations of the Second Vatican Council became prevalent in the
United States. For instance, a breakdown by generation of those who go to confession
at least yearly reveals this pattern:

•
40% of today’s teens go
• 39% of the post-Vatican II generation went
• 40%
of the Vatican II generation went
• 58% of the pre-Vatican II generation
went

Oddly absent from the discussions was the idea that a misunderstanding of Vatican
II—what Pope Benedict XVI calls the “hermeneutic of discontinuity”—may
have aided the chronological slide. Indeed, the growing interest in Catholic
tradition among some older teens and young adults was touched on only obliquely
and almost dismissively. This was surprising, considering the documentation of
this trend in Colleen Carroll’s The New Faithful: Why Young Adults
Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy.

McCarty welcomed an interest in older customs when pursued with knowledge and
in the right spirit. Donohue thought such cultural divides irrelevant, saying, “Teenagers
are more innocent [in regard to the] polarizations, liberal, conservative. .
. . I have to discipline myself not to put them in a category based on something
quite innocent that they might remark.”

She took great pains to underline the nontraditional nature of the Catholicism
her students practice. Adult preconceptions of the faith may hinder its passage
to the young, she explained. For her teens, the faith depends on relationships
and community. They are often syncretistic in their faith and prefer it to be
grounded in experience rather than obligation. She seemed to welcome this generational
malleability as proof of Catholicism’s strength.

Smith, by contrast, spoke of the vague faith of the young as non-Christian “moralistic,
therapeutic deism”—essentially the feeling that God’s out there,
we should be nice to each other, and we should be happy. The problem with this,
as McCarty pointed out,
is that there is absolutely no Christian dogma in this generic, cross-denominational
way of practicing religion.

What solution do the panelists propose?

Parental involvement remains key, McCarty explained. “Our parents can’t
teach what they do not know, and we need to help parents express their own religious
faith and identity.” Adults must know their faith if they are to pass it
on to their children.

Davidson pointed out that a detailed knowledge of doctrine is not necessarily
as important as a basic emphasis on the central place of the faith in family
life. To achieve this, he said, the church must reach out to young Catholic parents,
both those active in parish life and those outside of it.

Malloy stressed that adult mentorship is essential in preventing peer leadership
from becoming “shared ignorance.” It also gives teens something they
can return home to after whiz-bang events like World Youth Day.

Centering on Christ

What aspects of religion initially attract teens must also be discerned. As Davidson
remarked, “Many young people don’t want to start with Bible study
or learning. They want to start with behavior and engagement and participation.
With the proper guidance . . . they can be brought from that beginning point
to a greater understanding of what the faith is all about and what it represents
cognitively and intellectually.”

The goal, McCarty said, is to bring together head, hands, and heart: “head—most
certainly teach them about what we believe; heart—let’s encourage them to develop a relationship
with the person of Jesus; and hands—which is why mission trips are so important
in this day and age.”

In the end, this synthesis centered on Christ as the one who works—who
transcends left, right, and center, pre-conciliar, conciliar, and post-conciliar
viewpoints. If, in the end, after all the mission trips and catechesis, we can
show our teens the face of Christ, in all its compassion and charity, then we
will have the greatest answer to the very serious and solemn question of why
indeed Jesus had to get whacked.

Matthew G. Alderman is a freelance writer, liturgical artist, and contributor
to several blogs, including www.thenewliturgicalmovement.blogspot.com and www.holywhapping.blogspot.com.
He was recently named an assistant editor for Dappled Things, an online
literary magazine for young Catholic writers. A graduate of the University of
Notre Dame,
he lives in Manhattan, where he works in the field of architecture and attends
the Catholic Church of Our Saviour.

Believing Problem

There’s a disconnect
between them and the institutional church,” says sociologist
James A. Davidson of Purdue University, describing the “Millennial
Generation” of Catholics born after 1979. “And when they
get older, they are not going to be like the Catholics of previous
generations. They are
going to be the Catholics they are now.”

One of the authors of a new book, American Catholics Today, he
adds that “belonging is not a problem; they feel comfortable
calling the church home. And I don’t think serving is a problem.
It’s the believing that’s the problem.”

According to their study, which used data from Gallup surveys, only
37 percent of this generation of Catholics believe homosexual acts
always wrong, and only 21 percent think premarital sexual activity
always wrong. Only 7 percent thought opposition to abortion a core
Catholic teaching.

The “Millennial Generation” makes
up 9 percent of the Catholic Church in America.

The data is taken from Nancy Frazier
O’Brien’s “Sociologists
see strong identity, less commitment in young Catholics,” published
by the Catholic News Service, February 7, 2007.

— David Mills

“Youth in Formation” first appeared in the April 2007 issue of Touchstone. If you enjoyed this article, you'll find more of the same in every issue.

Letters Welcome: One of the reasons Touchstone exists is to encourage conversation among Christians, so we welcome letters responding to articles or raising matters of interest to our readers. However, because the space is limited, please keep your letters under 400 words. All letters may be edited for space and clarity when necessary. letters@touchstonemag.com